07.02
Some of you reading this know about AUVT. More of you think you know about AUVT. Still more have never heard of AUVT. If you knew the AUVT from before the fall of ‘08, you do not know AUVT. We’re all new, and rebuilding with a small but agile team; focused on organizing the spec-ops of AUV builders.
We have spent the last year as a freshman team. Not a single member of the six-man team has any experience with AUVs prior to 2008. Even with a much larger (15+) team, AUVT did not compete in 2008, and the 2007 entry just barely made it into the water. That’s where we started, and we’ve been learning everything from scratch. The previous iteration of the team left us with a pile of parts, some of which resembled AUV parts. We started by cleaning out the work area and sorting out the boxes and shelves of mysterious parts to see what we had. Exploring and finding all of the parts took almost exactly a year, with every week highlighted by discovering something that we wished we’d had a month ago on a forgotten shelf. We knew we had this thing called an “E-Rack” with a computer on it, and the hull with its “End Cap” seemed pretty straightforward, but that was all the knowledge we started with. The learning curve was long, but slowly and surely we educated ourselves in the ways of AUV, and we became prepared to tackle the task before us.
One of the first issues we faced with a new team was a lack of leadership. Everyone who knew how to lead the team had graduated the year before, and only one member remained who had witnessed some of the original design process. Fall of 2008 and Spring of 2009 went by with only minimal progress, and then both the experienced team member and the new team “captain” dissapeared. We knew the team was fragmented, but we tried to find the best ways we could to work around it. Whiteboards and wikis offered a solution, but resulted in little practical use. We are still a strange variant of “team”, with some of the members rarely even seeing each other, but it seems to work.
It was not long into the summer before we realized two things. One was that we don’t have time to write code from scratch, and the other is that the “Signal Processing” circuit board that we inherited from the previous version of the team was lacking in useability. It was decided to switch to code-generating software to help with the programming, and to ditch the all-in-one custom circuit board for off-the-shelf parts. Initial tests with both aspects were promising, but integration is proving to be tricky. Every day presents a new challenge from the AUV that has yet to be named, and every day we conquer a new hill on the oh-so-mountainous road to San Diego. We will rise to the occasion, solve every problem, and be ready when the day comes to show the world what we can do. We are AUVT, and we will have a completed AUV by July 25, or we will say a collective “dang it” and just use the AUV at next years competition and spend an entire year debugging.